Charlotte Corday and the Bathtub Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat – France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France History By Sarah Towle On 13 July 1793, the eve of the fourth anniversary of the sacking of the Bastille, 24-year-old noblewoman, Charlotte Corday, knocked on Jean-Paul Marat’s door for the third and final time. She’d already been turned away twice that day by Marat’s companion, Simone. But this time Charlotte arrived bearing a letter, penned in her own hand. The letter stated that she had come to name names; that she was prepared to betray to Marat the 18 Girondin “enemies of the Revolution” that he sought. Simone took the letter and shut the door with a slam, leaving Charlotte alone on the drab landing outside Marat’s Left Bank home, located just around the corner from his press. Charlotte Corday. From Evert A. Duykinck’s “A Portrait Gallery of Eminent Men and Women of Europe and America, with Biographies.” New York: Johnson, Wilson, and Company, 1873.

Digital image courtesy of the James Smith Noel Collection, Louisiana State University, Shreveport, LA. It was Charlotte’s last chance to retreat, but she did not. She’d written her farewell letters. She’d paid off her debts. She’d endured the long coach journey to Paris from Normandy. Charlotte had looked for Marat at the Palais Royal, considered the birthplace of the French Revolution as people could talk freely there, without fear of censorship. The home of the king’s cousin, Louis-Philippe Joseph II, duc d’Orleans, it was therefore royal property and the king’s police were forbidden to enter. Presses were even set up there to print broadsheets and journals espousing enlightenment values. And folks gathered night and day to share revolutionary ideas, out loud! Louis-Philippe Joseph, encouraging it all to happen, changed his name to Philippe Egalité. She’d pursued Marat at the National Convention as well, only to learn that he would not likely ever be found there again. He was ill, perhaps dying of an incurable skin disease contracted while hiding from enemies in the Paris sewers. His only solace was soaking in a bath of medicinal herbs.

When the pain was very great, he remained in his bath all day. She’d come this far. Now a mere threshold stood in the way of her greater goal. She stood her ground and waited. The letter did trick. Marat granted Mademoiselle Corday entry into a small, square room with a brick-tiled floor. A map of France hung upon worn wallpaper. There, she found Marat languishing in a tub the shape of a sabot, an old wooden shoe. A board lying across it served as a writing table. To keep warm, Marat sat upon a linen sheet, the dry ends covering his bare shoulders. A second sheet, draped across the tub and writing table, offered him a bit of privacy from his visitors. Marat was strange and unpleasant, thin and feverish. His head was wrapped in a filthy, vinegar-soaked handkerchief. Open lesions on his skin reeked of decaying, rotten flesh. Marat motioned for Charlotte to take the chair placed by his bath. She sat as requested, turning toward the open window, searching the still, hot summer air for what little breeze might chance to come her way. Her eyes began to tear, struggling against the stench of death and medicine.

And in the gloom of evening’s waning light, Marat wrote down, one by one, his head bent over his writing table, the names of each of Charlotte’s beloved Girondin friends, then holed up in Caen. Once finished, he raised his head. His blood-shot eyes met hers for the first time, and he proclaimed, hate dripping from his lips, “We’ll soon have them all guillotined in Paris!” Charlotte Corday by Paul Baudry, 1860. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Photo: Gérard Blot, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. At that moment Charlotte remembered why she had come. She pulled a kitchen knife from the folds of her dress and stabbed Marat right through the heart. One blow was all it took. She felt the knife penetrate flesh, bone, muscle. Marat died almost instantly. But it was not Charlotte who was martyred that day. On the contrary, it was Marat’s body that received a hero’s funeral.

In one of the greatest propaganda events ever to take place in the history of the Reign of Terror, Marat was placed in a proper coffin, paraded through the streets of Paris to the sound of weeping citizens, and buried at the Pantheon. He might have died quietly in his bath. Instead, all he stood for – all that Charlotte loathed – was championed before thousands by the radical Jacobins. In contrast, Charlotte was captured, tried, convicted and imprisoned at the Conciergerie, the antechamber to the guillotine. She lost not only her cause but also her head four days later, 17 July 1793, four years and four days after the symbolic debut of the peaceful Revolution she was attempting to save. Her remains were tossed, without ceremony, among those of the other victims of the Reign of Terror into an open, pestilent, public grave. Targeting a dying man rather than the more powerful, and more ruthless, among the Revolutionary leadership, did Charlotte truly believe, as her farewell letter to the French people maintains, that “with my single act of violence I will bring peace to my Nation”? Charlotte’s act of murder, rather than stopping the violence as she hoped, only unleashed more.

A long shadow of doubt was cast over the remaining Girondin delegates to the National Convention. Already in trouble for standing against the execution of King Louis XVI, they were now believed by Maximilien Robespierre, deputy of the Committee for Public Safety, and the radical Jacobins to have been in cahoots with young Corday, even though she insisted that they were not. Indeed, their presumed collaboration was never proven. However, all 21 Girondin delegates were put to death, just as Marat had wanted, on 29 October 1793. Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, would beat the 21 Girondins to the guillotine by a mere two weeks. Cousin Philippe Egalité, would follow them in November. Death of Marat bu Jacques Louis David (studio of), 1793. The Louvre. Photo: G. Blot/C. Jean, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. But as extremists and ideologues throughout history have learned, karma has a way of catching up with you.

It took two years and 20,000 lives, but the French eventually realized, like Charlotte, that the promise of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that the Revolution once represented had long since been lost. The most radical revolutionaries began to turn on each other. They, too, would meet their end at the guillotine, in a ritualized procession they would come to share with Corday. On the afternoon of her beheading, Charlotte was taken to the Salle de la Toilette of the Conciergerie. Her thick, chestnut curls were cut off above her neck at the express wish of Sanson, the Revolution’s executioner. The only thing capable of slowing the guillotine blade was human hair, which could only result in excruciating pain for the condemned. Though a professional killer, Sanson was humane. Charlotte’s hair was gathered up and placed in a basket for safekeeping: the wife of the Concierge made an extra living creating wigs from the hair of the guillotine’s victims.

Charlotte’s hands were then tied behind her back, and she was escorted to the Carré des douze (Square of the twelve), a small, triangular courtyard behind the iron gate in the cours des femmes (the women’s courtyard) of the Conciergerie Prison. The condemned were held there on the day of their execution, twelve at a time. That’s how many fit in a tumbrel. The tumbrel made the round trip, from prison to guillotine, as many as three times a day.When the empty tumbrel arrived at the Conciergerie, a large bell was sounded from a pull chain in the main courtyard of the Palais de Justice, the Cour du Mai. Charlotte was then taken into the May Courtyard were a group of black-toothed women revolutionaries, les tricoteuses (knitter-women), thus called because they knitted clothes and bandages for the Revolutionary troops, heckled her mercilessly. Believed to be in the pay of the public prosecutor, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, they incited the crowd to humiliate all prisoners of the Revolution as they made their final voyage to the guillotine.

Charlotte on the Evening of Her Death by Mme Fournier after Raffet, 1847, from Lamartine’s “L’Histoire des Girondins”, vol. 6. Photographic reproduction courtesy Moby’s Newt © 2010. Charlotte was then loaded with the others like cattle into the open wooden tumbrel and taken to the Place de la Revolution to face her beheading. She was the only one among the twelve to wear a red chemise (dress), the sign of her crime of murder. Witnesses say it poured with rain throughout Charlotte’s long journey to the Place de la Revolution. However, the weather would not scatter the crowd. No one wanted to miss the beheading of the murderer of Jean-Paul Marat. To do so might send a signal that you supported her actions. The streets were so clogged with onlookers that it took two hours for the tumbrel carrying Charlotte Corday to reach its bloodstained destination. En route down the Rue Saint Honoré to the guillotine, people hurled insults, even stones, at the prisoners, further humiliating them in their final hours of life. Charlotte remained standing, calm and poised, throughout the ordeal.

From a window overlooking the procession, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and George Danton, all friends of Marat, watched her pass. That this would one day be their own fate was the furthest thing from their minds. When the tumbrel finally reached the foot of the guillotine, the rain stopped. A purple sunset flooded the sky. Some among the twelve screamed and begged for mercy. Others struggled hopelessly to be free. Still others followed along, head cast downward, resigned. Only Charlotte mounted the scaffold steps without hesitation or assistance that day. She gave herself willingly to Sanson’s blade. © Sarah Towle Sarah Towle is Founder and Creative Director of Time Traveler Tours , mobile iTineraries that reveal history through the stories of characters who helped shape their time, enhanced with dash of interactive games. Charlotte Corday is the subject of the first of these new App tours, Beware Madame la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris , with which teens (12+) and adults can follow in the footsteps of this compelling historical figure for a “Revolutionary” and entertaining visit of Paris’ well-known and lesser-known sights.

“Beware Madame la Guillotine” was chosen as a finalist for the World Youth and Student Travel Conference 2012 App Yap Contest. France Revisited’s Revolutionary Charlotte Corday Contest The first three people to answer the following two questions correctly will win a free download of Sarah Towle’s app tour “Beware Madame la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris” ($7.99 value). Question 1: How many condemned typically fit in a tumbrel? Question 2: Marat, Robespierre, Danton and other major figures of the French Revolution frequented Le Procope, now Paris’s oldest café still in existence. The desks of which two philosophers of the Enlightenment are found at Le Procope? Answer in the comment section below or, if unable to do so or unsure that your message has been received, by e-mail to francerevisited@aol.com with “Revolutionary Charlotte Corday Contest” on your subject line. In either case, be sure to indicate your name and e-mail address in order to be notified. The contest has ended with three winners: Vince, Catt and Lesley. The answers: Twelve condemned could be carted to the guillotine in a tumbrel.

The desks of Voltaire and Rousseau are found at Le Procope. Several people knew that Voltaire’s desk is found at Le Procope but couldn’t find the second. Here’s a photo of that second one, which belonged to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thanks to all those who submitted answers. Stay tuned to future contests on France Revisited. SHARE Jean-Paul Marat | French politician, physician, and journalist | Britannica.com French politician, physician, and journalist Written By: French politician, physician, and journalist born André Jeanbon Saint-André Jean-Paul Marat, (born May 24, 1743, Boudry, near Neuchâtel, Switzerland—died July 13, 1793, Paris, France), French politician, physician, and journalist, a leader of the radical Montagnard faction during the French Revolution. He was assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday , a young Girondin conservative. Jean-Paul Marat, detail of a portrait by Joseph Boze, 1793; in the Museum of the History of Paris.

Giraudon/Art Resource, New York Early scientific work Marat, after obscure years in France and other European countries, became a well-known doctor in London in the 1770s and published a number of books on scientific and philosophical subjects. His Essay on the Human Soul (1771) had little success, but A Philosophical Essay on Man (1773) was translated into French and published in Amsterdam (1775–76). His early political works included The Chains of Slavery (1774), an attack on despotism addressed to British voters, in which he first expounded the notion of an “aristocratic,” or “court,” plot; it would become the principal theme of a number of his articles. Returning to the Continent in 1777, Marat was appointed physician to the personal guards of the comte d’Artois (later Charles X ), youngest brother of Louis XVI of France. At this time he seemed mainly interested in making a reputation for himself as a successful scientist. He wrote articles and experimented with fire, electricity, and light. His paper on electricity was honoured by the Royal Academy of Rouen in 1783.

At the same time, he built up a practice among upper-middle-class and aristocratic patients. In 1783 he resigned from his medical post, probably intending to concentrate on his scientific career. In 1780 he published his Plan de législation criminelle (“Plan for Criminal Legislation”), which showed that he had already assimilated the ideas of such critics of the ancien régime as Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and was corresponding with the American Revolutionary leader Benjamin Franklin. More serious, perhaps, was Marat’s failure to be elected to the Academy of Sciences. Some historians, notably the American Louis Gottschalk, have concluded that he came to suffer from a “martyr complex,” imagining himself persecuted by powerful enemies. Thinking that his work refuted the ideas of Sir Isaac Newton, he joined the opponents of the established social and scientific order. In the first weeks of 1789—the year that saw the beginning of the French Revolution —Marat published his pamphlet Offrande à la patrie (“Offering to Our Country”), in which he indicated that he still believed that the monarchy was capable of solving France’s problems.

In a supplement published a few months later, though, he remarked that the king was chiefly concerned with his own financial problems and that he neglected the needs of the people; at the same time, Marat attacked those who proposed the British system of government as a model for France. Attacks on the aristocracy Leap Second Beginning in September 1789, as editor of the newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Marat became an influential voice in favour of the most radical and democratic measures, particularly in October, when the royal family was forcibly brought from Versailles to Paris by a mob. He particularly advocated preventive measures against aristocrats, whom he claimed were plotting to destroy the Revolution. Early in 1790 he was forced to flee to England after publishing attacks on Jacques Necker , the king’s finance minister; three months later he was back, his fame now sufficient to give him some protection against reprisal.

He did not relent but directed his criticism against such moderate Revolutionary leaders as the marquis de Lafayette, the comte de Mirabeau, and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, mayor of Paris (a member of the Academy of Sciences); he continued to warn against the émigré s, royalist exiles who were organizing counterrevolutionary activities and urging the other European monarchs to intervene in France and restore the full power of Louis XVI. Jean-Paul Marat. Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies In 1790 and 1791 Marat gradually came to the view that the monarchy should be abolished; after Louis XVI’s attempt to flee in June 1791, he declared the king "unworthy to remount the throne" and violently denounced the National Assembly for refusing to depose the king. As a delegate to the National Convention (beginning in September 1792), he advocated such reforms as a graduated income tax, state-sponsored vocational training for workers, and shorter terms of military service. Though he had often advocated the execution of counterrevolutionaries, Marat seems to have had no direct connection with the wholesale massacres of suspects that occurred in the same month.

He had opposed France’s declaration of war against antirevolutionary Austria in April, but, once the war had begun and the country was in danger of invasion, he advocated a temporary dictatorship to deal with the emergency. Actively supported by the Parisian people both in the chamber and in street demonstrations, Marat quickly became one of the most prominent members of the Convention. Attacks by the conservative Girondin faction early in 1793 made him a symbol of the Montagnards , or radical faction, although the Montagnard leaders kept him out of any position of real influence. In April the Girondins had him arraigned before a Revolutionary tribunal. His acquittal of the political charges brought against him (April 24) was the climax of his career and the beginning of the fall of the Girondins from power. Assassination On July 13, Charlotte Corday , a young Girondin supporter from Normandy, was admitted to Marat’s room on the pretext that she wished to claim his protection, and she stabbed him to death in his bath (he took frequent medicinal baths to relieve a skin infection).

Marat’s dramatic murder at the very moment of the Montagnards’ triumph over their opponents caused him to be considered a martyr to the people’s cause. His name was given to 21 French towns and later, as a gesture symbolizing the continuity between the French and Russian revolutions, to one of the first battleships in the Soviet navy. The Death of Marat , by French artist and member of the Jacobin Club Jacques-Louis David , was painted just days after the murder. Called the “Pietà of the Revolution” (in reference to Michelangelo’s sculpture ) and widely considered David’s masterpiece, the painting is frequently reproduced for its historical and artistic value. The Death of Marat, oil painting by Jacques-Louis David, 1793; in the … Giraudon/Art Resource, New York Jean Paul Marat Search for: Jean Paul Marat Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) has become one of the French Revolution’s most identifiable figures, as much for his untimely death as his political contributions he made in life. Marat, like Rousseau and Necker, was born in Switzerland, the son of an Italian father and a French Huguenot mother.

He left home as a teenager and travelled to Paris, where he undertook studies in medicine and set up practice as a doctor. By the 1770s Marat had also taken an interest in the Enlightenment philosophes, so he began writing works of political theory. He also spent several years in Holland, Scotland and England, where he studied the British political system and wrote prolifically on both politics and medicine. Marat returned in Paris in 1776, where set up a flourishing medical practice. He soon found himself in demand as a physician, his clientele including members of Parisian high society and Charles Philippe, youngest brother of Louis XVI. Desperate to penetrate the intellectual elites, Marat also continued both his scientific research and his political writing. He conducted experiments on the nature of light and optics; his findings were examined and commended by Enlightenment figures like Benjamin Franklin. Despite this, Marat’s research was rejected by the Académie des Sciences, possibly because of his lack of education and patronage. Marat’s political writings were also ridiculed by Voltaire and his followers. By the late 1780s Marat had become frustrated and resentful at this treatment.

A depiction of a younger Marat, wearing the famous liberty cap The onset of the French Revolution presented Marat with both opportunities and new ideas. The convocation of the Estates General prompted Marat to take up his pen for the Third Estate. Between late 1788 and mid 1789 he wrote several essays urging constitutional reform and political equality for all French citizens. At least one of these essays was tabled in the National Constituent Assembly, during its constitutional deliberations. In September 1789 Marat began publishing his own newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple (‘The Friend of the People’). In its first edition Marat attacked the Second Estate and demanded that all nobles be expelled from the Assembly. In the second he refocused his aim on bourgeois bankers and financiers, men who, according to Marat, “built their fortunes atop the ruination of others”. Marat’s newspaper, written single-handedly and published several times a week, was enormously popular with the working people of Paris. The appeal of L’Ami du Peuple was derived not from its political ideas but its focus and tone.

Every edition claimed to expose some scandal or conspiracy; every copy launched a scathing new attack on perceived enemies of the people. “Papers like Marat’s held the attention through the sheer relentless ferocity of their ranting and the waves of indignation and panic they could stir by pointing to hidden nests of traitors and conspirators. Others… contrived to reproduce the authentic voice of the bon bougre [good men] – the foul-mouthed plain-talking man of the wine shops and the markets, his head enveloped by the fumes of alcohol and tobacco and his tongue hot with expletives directed at l’Autrichenne [‘the Austrian bitch’]. Their appeal was verbal violence.” Simon Schama, historian Marat’s targets shifted as the revolution evolved and radicalised. At first he attacked the king and his ministers, the nobility, the high clergy and the affluent bourgeoisie. By late 1789 L’Ami du Peuple was haranguing the National Constituent Assembly for protecting feudal and bourgeois business interests, for not implementing universal suffrage, for not going far enough.

The Paris Commune, the National Guard and political moderates like Necker, Mirabeau, Lafayette, Bailly and Barnave were also frequent targets. As might be expected, Marat’s poison pen made him a target for liberals and moderates. Between the autumn of 1789 and late 1792 he was regularly subject to arrest warrants and government suppression. Marat spent October and November 1789 hiding in the sewers and catacombs of Paris, while the Commune and the gendarmerie sought his arrest. He returned briefly but fled again in late January 1790, taking refuge in England for four months. Marat’s return to Paris in May 1791 lasted until late July, when L’Ami du Peuple was held accountable for Jacobin radicalism and the Champ de Mars massacre and its printing presses were destroyed by gendarmes. Marat spent yet another period of exile in England between December 1791 and March 1792. L’Ami du Peuple was a one-man operation so it ceased publication whenever Marat went into exile or hiding.

By the summer of 1792 the revolution was becoming more radical and Marat and his ideas were gaining popularity. Now backed by the republican Cordeliers, Marat’s articles spat venom at the monarchy, the Girondins, foreign spies and other suspected counter-revolutionaries. L’Ami du Peuple helped fuel the insurrection of August 10th 1792 that culminated in the invasion of the Tuileries. Marat was also held responsible for the massacre of prisoners in Paris the following month, a charge he did not deny. In September 1792 Marat was elected to the National Convention. He spent the next six months bickering with Girondins within the Convention and attacking them in print outside. In April 1793 Marat was arrested and tried before Paris’ Revolutionary Tribunal, on charges he had called for widespread violence and the suspension of the National Convention. He was acquitted after delivering a passionate defence. Two months later the Girondins, were expelled from the Convention. Marat, once the enemy of the revolution, had become one of its most important leaders, both inside the Convention and on the streets of Paris.

Baudry’s 1860 depiction of the death of Marat On July 13th 1793, Marat was murdered at his home on the Rue de Cordelier. Famously depicted in a painting by Jacques-Louis David, his death remains one of the revolution’s most dramatic scenes. Marat’s assassin was Charlotte Corday, a 24-year-old unmarried woman from Normandy. Raised in a convent, Corday was well educated, politically astute and a keen student of revolutionary events. By 1792 she had become a follower of the Girondins, believing them the logical leaders of the new nation. Corday detested radicals in the Montagnard faction, particularly Marat. In mid 1793 she travelled to Paris, intending to assassinate Marat in public at the Fête de la Fédération. After discovering that Marat was too unwell to attend, Corday visited his house on the morning of July 13th but was refused entry. Undeterred, she returned to her hotel and penned a letter to Marat, offering information about Girondinist plotting in her native Normandy.

She also changed her clothing and attended a hairdresser, hoping to appear more alluring. Jean-Paul Marat’s death mask Corday returned to Marat’s apartments at around 7pm on the evening of July 13th. This time she was allowed to enter and found the radical journalist soaking in a bath. Marat was desperately unwell and, according to some sources, already close to death. Riddled with eczema and weeping skin lesions, he bathed constantly; unable to hold down solid food, he drank copious amounts of coffee. After chatting with Marat and providing him with a list of names, Corday unveiled a five-inch kitchen knife, which she plunged into his chest. Marat’s wife and attendants rushed in and desperately hauled him from the bath, though death was almost instantaneous. In the days that followed Marat was hailed as a martyr and immortalised in word, art and symbolism. His funeral was attended by thousands, his heart was embalmed and kept at the Cordeliers club, his remains were entombed in the Panthéon. Corday was immediately sent to trial and guillotined on July 17th.

Though she was almost certainly acting alone, Marat’s murder touched off another savage wave of violence against counter-revolutionaries, royalist agents and Girondinists. While the murder of Marat did not directly cause the Reign of Terror, it certainly contributed to the paranoia from which it sprang. 1. Jean-Paul Marat was a physician, political writer and journalist, whose newspaper L’Ami du Peuple became a popular source of radical ideas between 1789 and 1793. 2. Born in Switzerland, Marat trained and worked as a physician in Paris, while also conducting scientific experiments and writing political theory. 3. While he had periods of success as a physician, Marat found it difficult to break into the scientific and philosophical elite, which made him bitter and resentful. 4. The onset of revolution provided Marat with an opportunity to write radical political texts. In September 1789 he started L’Ami du Peuple, a newspaper that attacked the perceived enemies of the revolution. 5. After contributing significantly to growing radicalism in Paris, Marat was murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Girondinist supporter. His death was a contributing factor to the Reign of Terror.

© Alpha History 2015. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use . This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation: J. Llewellyn and S. Thompson, “Jean Paul Marat”, Alpha History, accessed [today’s date], John Paul Marat is assassinated - 1793 Crime Magazine by Michael Thomas Barry On July 13, 1793, Jean Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken leaders of the French Revolution, is stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Royalist sympathizer. Originally a doctor, Marat founded the journal L'Ami du Peuple in 1789, and its fiery criticism of those in power was a contributing factor to the bloody turn of the Revolution in 1792. With the arrest of the king in August of that year, Marat was elected as a deputy of Paris to the Convention. In France's revolutionary legislature, Marat opposed the Girondists--a faction made up of moderate republicans who advocated a constitutional government and continental war.

By 1793, Charlotte Corday, the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and an ally of the Girondists in Normandy, came to regard Marat as the unholy enemy of France and plotted his assassination. Leaving her native Caen for Paris, she had planned to kill Marat at the Bastille Day parade on July 14 but was forced to seek him out in his home when the festivities were canceled. On July 13, she gained an audience with Marat by promising to betray the Caen Girondists. Marat, who had a persistent skin disease, was working as usual in his bath when Corday pulled a knife from her bodice and stabbed him in his chest. He died almost immediately, and Corday waited calmly for the police to come and arrest her. She was guillotined four days later. Michael Thomas Barry is the author of Murder & Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949.

The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link: The Death of Marat The death of Marat Wikipedia says: "The Death of Marat (French: La Mort de Marat or Marat Assassiné) is a painting by Jacques-Louis David of the murdered French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. It is one of the most famous images of the Revolution. David was the leading French painter, as well as a Montagnard and a member of the revolutionary Committee of General Security. The painting shows the radical journalist lying dead in his bath on 13 July 1793 after his murder by Charlotte Corday. Painted in the months after Marat's murder, it has been described by T. J. Clark as the first modernist painting, for "the way it took the stuff of politics as its material, and did not transmute it". I had a lot of trouble finding this old, classical oil painting on google image search, so this page serves to include additional search terms for anyone in the same situation: It's a dead man in a bathtub. He is (or rather was) writing a note with a quill.

It could look as if he commited suicide by slitting his wrists in the bath, and there's a knife on the floor and a letter in his hand, but he was in fact murdered. He's bleeding, the water stained red with blood, and he's still holding on to his feather pen. Leave a reply Marat dead in his bath after Corday’s visit. From the painting by David. Two of the more interesting minor players in the French Revolution were Jean-Paul Marat (1743 – 93) and Charlotte Corday D’Armont (1768 – 93). Marat , rather strangely for a French revolutionary leader, was a qualified doctor who practised medicine in London. It was in the British capital that he published his revolutionary tract Philosophical Essay on Man. Marat was thirty when the pamphlet was distributed in English, causing him considerable fame among the English chattering classes. In it Marat contradicted the view of Helvétius which was that science was irrelevant for a philosopher. He returned to Paris to edit the new radical newspaper L’ami du peuple, and shortly became one of the members of the extremist Cordelier Club.

He rapidly rose in the ranks of people of importance involved in the anti-Monarchist, anti-Church, anti-Parliament but still Glorious Revolution. Though he was by no means a fool, he proceeded to attack other leading revolutionaries – on humane grounds usually – but managed to avoid the usual punishment for such lèse majesté. Briefly exiled (but not murdered) by public prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville in 1790, he returned in 1792 to be elected to the Assembly in opposition to the Girondins. This led to triumph in 1793, when the Girondins were soundly defeated in the Assembly, after which most of that group were shortened by a head on the guillotine. For once Marat did not care about the shedding of blood. Infected by an unknown skin disease, Marat had to spend most of each day lying in a salty bath, something which as a doctor he approved of, had indeed proposed.

Naked in a bath he was however unprotected, and an aristocratic young woman called Charlotte Corday D’Armont got herself inside Marat’s house in Paris with a knife, and stabbed the philosopher/doctor to death in his bath. He was fifty years old, and by this marginally less brutal death managed to avoid the guillotine which awaited virtually all his friends and colleagues in the Revolution, including its chosen leader – Robespierre. Charlotte Corday was, as I have said, a French noblewoman. She spent a lonely and fruitless childhood in family farms in Normandy. At eighteen she heard of the Girondins (with the Jacobins) a prominent and powerful revolutionary group, which she promptly joined. Signing up with the Girondins gave her for the first time an abiding interest in life, but it also caused the death of Marat and Charlotte herself. From what Charlotte knew of Jean-Paul Marat she thought him a tyrant, and her obsession with the idea of doing away with him became traumatic. He was not in fact a tyrant, quite the opposite in fact, but Charlotte was easily convinced by other Girondins who wished his death.

She arrived in Paris in 1793, an ominous year for both Marat and herself. Quickly she found where Marat lived, and managed to enter the house unobserved. As related above, she found Marat alone, defenceless in a bath, and taking a knife from the kitchen she stabbed him a number of times and later allowed herself to be arrested. At her trial she claimed to have removed a tyrant from this world, though her lawyer claimed insanity. At a time when the Committee for Public Safety was killing hundreds of French people simply because they were opposed to the Revolution, or merely aristocrats, a claim of insanity was not going to be of much use. Charlotte was guillotined. She was twenty-five. In the stage play known as The Marat/Sade (the actual title is much longer) staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, Charlotte’s part was played interestingly enough by a Marxist/Socialist radical actress called Glenda Jackson, later an MP. It was thought at the time that Miss Jackson did not know she was playing the part of a titled noblewoman.

Her acting was splendid however, and the role of Charlotte Corday made her name and started her film career. Share the post "Figures in a Revolution: J-P Marat and Charlotte Corday" French Revolution and the Death of Marat - A Most Merry and Illustrated History The French Revolution and the Death of Marat A Most Merry and Illustrated Soundbyte of History of a Most Un-Merry and Un-Illustrative Era You can't tell the good guys (or gals) from the bad guys (or gals) Life in Gay Paree The trouble with the French Revolution is you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys. Were the good guys the peasants who worked the fields and stormed the Bastille? Or was it the powdered, bewigged messieurs and the coiffured, decolletéd mesdames who patronized the great art of the French eighteenth century? Was King Louis XVI a good guy, but just stupid and naive? Was Marie Antoinette a good gal, but even more naive? Or were they greedy, indolent villains and despots living off the sweat of the poor?

One thing we can agree on, mes amis, and that was that the physician and journalist Jean-Paul Marat was a real jerk. You can't pooh-pooh him as a Republican who just got caught up in the zeal of the Revolution. He just flat out didn't like people and got his jollies chopping their heads off. The Death of Marat Jean-Paul met his end, as everyone knows on July 13, 1793 sitting in his bath. He had some kind of skin disease, and the constant soaking was the only way he could get relief. Paintings of him show a fellow with a clear complexion, but in reality it was both hard for people to look at him and not to stare. If people had have had patience, Jean-Paul would certainly have been taken away with his buddy Robespierre at the National Convention a year later. But Charlotte Corday, a young lady from Caen, didn't know that. All she knew was Marat was a jackass who went around guillotining people and was turning what could have been a nice, quiet and reasonable revolution into nothing more than a vendetta bloodbath against political opponents.

So Charlotte wrote up a phony list of names and came knocking on Jean-Paul's door. She wanted, she told Jean-Paul's servant, to turn over the names of some traitors. Some people wonder why a young lady was allowed into the presence of a naked man. But this was France, after all, and no one thought anything about it. At first Jean-Paul tried to give her the brush off, saying his list of traitors was fully subscribed, thank you. But Charlotte was so persistent that he told his servants to let her in. He'd add her traitors to the list he already had. As Jean-Paul was writing down a note authorizing everyone on the new list to be killed, Charlotte yanked out a knife and a quick stab did the trick. Jean-Paul only had time to call for help before he died. Charlotte got the usual speedy trial and went to the guillotine four days later. Of course Jacques Louis David, the painter of great talent and even greater political flexibility, painted a picture of the episode. He also was a friend of Jean-Paul and Robespierre but, by golly, just happened to be absent from the Convention when Robespierre was deposed.

But his painting of Marat in his bath was toted along in Jean-Paul's funeral, and if we can believe the painting, Jacques Louis had given Jean-Paul a present of a box to hold his ink bottle. At least that's what the writing on the box said. Vive La Revolución (Perpetual)! Even more perplexing than who were the good guys and bad guys in the French Revolution was when did that sucker end? Was it when Napoleon Bonaparte and two of his buddies were "elected" consuls? Or was it in 1804, when Nappy was crowned Emperor? Perhaps we should choose the later date, 1814 when Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, and the kingship was restored. La Republique est mort! Vive les Bourbons! But now that you think of it, maybe it's better to say the French Revolution ended in 1830 when the Bourbons were kicked out and replaced with their cousins from Orleans. But what about 1848 when the kings were finally once and for all kicked out of France and the Second Republic declared.

Or maybe it was 1850 when Napoleon's family was back in charge and Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Joesphine's grandson) declared himself king. Of course, you can also say it was in 1870 when Napoleon's family was bounced out and another republic (the Third) was declared. On the other hand, some people like 1871 when the Paris Commune declared it was the official government. But the Commune lasted only two months and was defeated by the Third Republic which had never lost power. So the Third Republic is probably a good place to stop and say that once it was in power the Revolution was finally over. After all, The Third Republic lasted until 1940 when a guy named Phillipe Petain decided - quote - "neutrality" - unquote - was the way to go in World War II. So he was allowed to set up a new government called Vichy France which lasted until 1945. Of course you can count the Provisional government from 1944 to 1946, but then that would be unfair to the Fourth Republic that came in afterwards.

But if you think about it and want to define the end of the revolution as we do ours - that is, when there was finally a government that they use today - then the French Revolution didn't really end until 1958 when France adopted their current constitution. That's the Fifth - count 'em - Fifth French Republic. Well, if at first you don't succeed... The MHEU | The Assassination of Marat Cover this breast which I cannot behold Pleasure hidden beneath morality The relaxation of moral standards The nude in the bath becomes realistic The 20th century: La Dolce Vita The suicide of Seneca or the fatal bath The Assassination of Marat The Masters of Suspense The Assassination of Marat Jean-Paul Marat, a key figure in the French Revolution, started to adopt an extremist stance from 1789 onwards. Through the mouthpiece of his newspaper L'ami du peuple (The People's Friend), he called for the establishment of a dictatorship to complete the work of the Revolution.

Elected as a member of the Convention of'92, he launched a violent attack on the Girondins, encouraged the Terror and aroused the hatred of many, including Charlotte Corday who murdered him as he was taking his habitual bath to ease the effects of a chronic skin disease, on July 13, 1793. For the revolutionaries, he was a hero and that is how David painted him in the very year of his death. Under the Second Empire, Paul Baudry was inspired to paint an entirely different view of the subject, making Charlotte Corday the heroine who rid France of a tyrant. Finally, in 1880, with the Republic in place once more, Jean-Joseph Weerts again portrayed Marat as a Christ-like hero and Charlotte Corday as simply a murderer. Jacques Louis David (studio of) 1793 Musée du Louvre, Paris © RMN / Gérard Blot / Christian Jean This painting, The Death of Marat, was finished in October 1793, just three months after the murder. Several versions and a number of copies exist.

One version, said to be the penultimate one, was only recently discovered and sold in Paris in September 2008. The final version is supposed to be the one in the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels, which would make the version in the Louvre the antepenultimate one. Here we notice the painter's great talent for portraiture and the incomparable subtlety of his rendering of light—qualities that are less obvious in his large-scale historical scenes. The most noticeable aspect is the strange light coming from the left and shining on the dark wall like a theater spotlight. It illuminates the body and casts admirable shadows on the skin, highlighting the letter that Marat still holds in his hand as well as the wooden box used as a table for the inkwell and on the side of which is written: "A Marat, David" in the Brussels version and "N'ayant pu me corrompre ils m'ont assassiné" (Unable to corrupt me, they murdered me) in the Paris version.

Jacques Louis David Jacques-Louis David, born in Paris in 1748, is considered the great representative of the Neoclassical school, which lauded the esthetic canons of Antiquity and perfection of execution. At sixteen he entered the studio of the Rococo painter Joseph-Marie Vien at the Académie Royale. He narrowly failed three times to win the Prix de Rome (after the third attempt, in 1773, he tried to kill himself), before winning it in 1774. He remained in Rome until 1780, returned to exhibit at the Salon du Palais du Louvre in Paris and was elected to the Académie Royale. During the Revolution (he was one of its most fervent agitators before himself being imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre), he developed a particular style based on Roman classical art. His work took on a patriotic and moralistic tone.

In 1797, he met Napoleon, then General Bonaparte (who was to appoint him First Painter to the Empire in 1804) and was to remain loyal to him until the debacle of Waterloo, which caused him to be exiled from the kingdom by Louis XVIII, in 1816. He found refuge in Brussels where he painted a series of portraits of prominent Belgian figures. Despite being granted amnesty, he refused to return to France and died in the Belgian capital in 1825. Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts © RMN / Gérard Blot This version of the Assassination of Marat depicts Corday as a frightened, perhaps even dreamy young Virgin. Does she regret her action? Baudry has a map of France pinned to the wall against which she is leaning. What does it signify? Painted in 1860, in the middle of the Second Empire, this picture seeks above all to offend no-one. Charlotte Corday can be seen as the symbol of France as a victim of the Terror (hence the map), or as a poor irresponsible foolish young woman.

Yet the painting is above all Baudry's tribute to David: it represents the same scene in an identical setting and with the same furniture (the wooden box used as a table, the board across the bathtub covered with a green cloth) but seen from another angle. Only the knife is different. And on this point Baudry is right: the police report mentions an ebony rather than an ivory handle. Paul Baudry Born into a humble family in La Roche-sur-Yon in 1828 (his father was a cobbler), Paul Baudry won a scholarship to study at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1844. He won the Prix de Rome in 1850 on his fifth attempt, (which he shared with Bouguereau). There would be nothing much to say about this Neoclassical artist, a lover of Raphael, Michelangelo and Italian Renaissance painting, had he not become one of the staunchest opponents of Manet and later Impressionism. His respectable academic career and the friendship of Napoleon III ought to have been enough.

Although Emile Zola may have made him his whipping boy for a time, one must not forget that he was held in high esteem in his day. There was even talk of replacing the originals of Michelangelo and Raphael with his copies, considered excellent, for fear that they might be destroyed by the gaslights catching fire—an argument that hastened the installation of electric lighting where these precious works were hung. Musée La Piscine, Roubaix © Musée La Piscine, Roubaix This patriotically-inspired Assassination of Marat, painted in 1880, presents a revised version of historical events, with Charlotte Corday portrayed as a dangerous terrorist execrated by the good people. No tribute to David here. Charlotte Corday is still holding the bloody knife and, with complete disregard for history, a horde of hysterical revolutionaries burst into the room to arrest her. The painting most resembles a modern-day musical or, in those days, an opéra comique. There is nonetheless a sentimentality, a grandiloquence and a kitsch profusion of color that are the trademarks of this respectable craftsman.

Jean-Joseph Weerts Jean-Joseph Weerts was born in Roubaix in 1846 to Belgian immigrant parents who had moved to northern France to work in the textile industry. His father, an excellent draughtsman, gave him lessons, later sending him to the Academy in Roubaix. The young Jean-Joseph was gifted and won a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he joined the studio of Cabanel. This marked the beginning of a perfect academic career involving patriotic and edifying historical painting, portraits of famous people and religious painting. He became one of the most prominent artists of the Third Republic, a member of the Conseil Supérieur des Beaux-Arts and Commander of the Légion d'Honneur. In 1924, he established the Weerts painting prize and in 1927, the year of his death, he opened his own museum in Roubaix.

Charlotte Corday assassinates Marat - Jul 13, 1793 - HISTORY.com Charlotte Corday assassinates Marat Publisher A+E Networks Jean Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken leaders of the French Revolution, is stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Royalist sympathizer. Originally a doctor, Marat founded the journal L’Ami du Peuple in 1789, and its fiery criticism of those in power was a contributing factor to the bloody turn of the Revolution in 1792. With the arrest of the king in August of that year, Marat was elected as a deputy of Paris to the Convention. In France’s revolutionary legislature, Marat opposed the Girondists–a faction made up of moderate republicans who advocated a constitutional government and continental war. By 1793, Charlotte Corday, the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and an ally of the Girondists in Normandy, came to regard Marat as the unholy enemy of France and plotted his assassination.

Leaving her native Caen for Paris, she had planned to kill Marat at the Bastille Day parade on July 14 but was forced to seek him out in his home when the festivities were canceled. On July 13, she gained an audience with Marat by promising to betray the Caen Girondists. Marat, who had a persistent skin disease, was working as usual in his bath when Corday pulled a knife from her bodice and stabbed him in his chest. He died almost immediately, and Corday waited calmly for the police to come and arrest her. She was guillotined four days later. Related Videos

Question: Which French Noblewoman murdered Jean-Paul Marrat in his bath
Answer: Charlotte Corday